Embodiments herein relate to systems and methods that compensate for skipped-pitch delays that occur when printing or feeding devices operate in conjunction with finishing devices.
It is common for production environments to utilize printing, feeding, and finishing equipment together to produce finished items. For example, items can be printed while the finishing devices are used to alter, gather, stack, move, etc., the printed items, which sometimes creates finished products such as signs, bound books, magazines, finished mailers, etc.
One issue within production environments that use printing and finishing equipment together is the synchronization of such printing and finishing equipment. Many times, the printer and finisher may operate at different rates, causing one to wait for the other. This is especially complicated with any type of variable print applications where different printed items can be different from one another, and where the different printed items may be processed differently by the finishing equipment. In variable information printing (VIP) or variable data printing (VDP) the print job includes static items (that are included in all versions of the printed item) that are supplemented with variable items (that change in different versions of the printed item). The productivity of variable print applications requiring finishing is impacted by skipped-pitches introduced to provide time for finishing movements. Further, down-stream finisher bottlenecks are created due to the variability in the variable job stream, resulting in printer skipped-pitches. In cases where a print job contains a varying number of subsets and varying skipped-pitches between subsets, estimating production forecasting can be unreliable.
Such challenges presented are enhanced because of the high speed of the equipment involved, which can prevent human intervention when user actions might be dangerous around fast-moving equipment, or user input may be too slow to keep the equipment operating at optimal rates.